Gallup had voters under 30 voting for Nixon, 52-48.
University of Michigan had voters 18-24 voting for McGovern, 49.4-48.8.
Gallup had college freshmen (56-40) and sophomores (50-47) voting for Nixon, and juniors (55-41) and seniors (52-45) voting for McGovern.
I vote 20-21 only, though 22-24 was probably very close. Incidentally, CBS in 1976 shows voters 18-21 voting 50-48 for Ford over Carter.
Younger Southern white voters were the voters switching to the GOP most heavily; the Southern Whites that "came back" to vote for Carter tended to be older voters. George Wallace endorsed Carter in the GE in 1976, and that was a BIG deal in terms of Carter carrying 10 Southern states, but that appeal was more to older voters.
When the Vietnam War stopped being an issue, young folks in 1976 tended to revert to how their parents voted. The cultural divide between the two parties' candidates in 1976 was minimal; nowhere near as stark as today. Ford was considered to be a good guy, and he had hip kids that young folks could relate to, while Carter's Evangelical Christianity was off-putting in circles of many moderate white voters outside the South who had Mainline Protestant or Catholic backgrounds. And Betty Ford was considered a cool, liberal FLOTUS. To many younger voters in 1976, Ford seemed the more culturally liberal candidate. I know that's something most young voters today can't possibly imagine, but our politics was nowhere near as ideologically driven then as it is today.
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